It was in 1991 when Stewart Alsop, then editor of Infoworld in the United States, made his famous quote:

“I predict that the last mainframe will be unplugged on 15 March 1996 “

In 1996, the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) had not yet a mainframe installed. They started in 2002 with mainframes!

Today (2021), exactly 30 years after Stewart Alsop’s prediction, ICBC is one of the biggest mainframe users in the world.

ISBC has installed more than 160’000 MIPS in its production environment with more than 1.2 PB disk space online attached and executes 1.5 billion CICS transactions every day.

IBM often claims that the biggest banks in the world use their mainframes to cope with an immense transaction rate.

I analyzed which banks are the largest banks in the world today and asked myself the question: do they really use mainframes?

Wikipedia showed me the following result:

Source: Wikipedia, January 20, 2021

As you can see, ISBC is in fact the biggest bank in the world and you can very easily check: All of the listed top 10 financial institutes are using mainframes today.  And all of them have a Sysplex / GDPS environment in place and most of them use an active/active configuration to prevent outages, even if a complete computer center crashes.
If we go further down the list of largest banks, we find:

• Deutsche Bank is number 21
• UBS is number 33
• Credit Suisse is number 41
• Commerzbank is number 63.

Yes, I’m mainly interested in the German and Swiss Banks because these are in my direct neighborhood :-).

All of them – I know that by sure because all of them are customers of my company – use mainframes and all of them use the IBM mainframe parallel sysplex technology to prevent outages.